


(but is this really?) the progression of things

by jazzfic



Category: The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/M, Gen, Saturnalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:45:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPACE BARISTAS: in space, no one can hear you steam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(but is this really?) the progression of things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muir_Wolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/gifts).



> I don’t live on a spaceship, but if I did, I’d want it to be a Terducken-style falling to bits hybrid of all my favourites. Goodbye, Saturnalia! we go out on a splutter and a fizz! Big thanks to Lauren for beta reading; and to dearest Marie, the world out there is everything, and this small part of it is for you.

About halfway along the third lower deck of the _Joan Taurus IV_ the air gets a little sticky. It’s not a smell – damp mildew, or racks of cargo still settling after months of flight – but more of a feeling. Like the creeping-up shadow of a spirit, or a conversation lingering from another voyage, generations gone and never remembered. This is an old ship. It’s thinned with wear and living and shined down to the steel of its frame. And there’s lots of hiding places. Lots of places left bare. 

She hates coming down here. Hates it every time, but they’re with the bottom dwellers in the chain of privilege on this boat, and that means storage allocation where they can have it. Hell, it’s not as if she’s after med-kits or fuel canisters or anything vital. Stirrers. That’s all she’s here for. Little wooden stirrers so people can dissolve their sucrose shots and have something to leave lying about for her to pick up afterwards, like she’s got nothing better to do than wander around with a trash bag, her calves screaming out for a bath.

Huh, and good luck with that fantasy. About seven minutes of almost hot water in a corner stall shower is about as much as she’ll ever get. Meanwhile here she is, breathing in the sweet musk of the doldrums, sway, sway, swaying on her feet. 

It’s a beautiful life, a life in space.

One of the scanners beeps a warning. The door to her left stays shut, so she waits, eyeballing the worn pattern on the tiled floor as the ship’s CORE reads the passchip branded into her shoulder. She’ll need a new one soon, it’s her golden ticket to any sort of work out here, but they cost, as does everything. Costs to live, costs to hide. Costs to run away and an even greater cost to stay. Not that she’s running any more. 

To her right, the greenhouses; White-level clearance, science and research. She’s not going there though, she wouldn’t want to. Her own clearance level goes to Yellow and not a single shade more, yellow turning to brown like a banana peel. Yellow, like the rest of her rotation. 

Another beep. The door slides open.

She takes a breath and holds it, dodging past the honeycomb grates separating out her walkway from piles of recycled waste that tower over her head. When she reaches the double doors stenciled with the words Retail Supplies she exhales unsteadily and tries to ignore the pinch of a headache. The air pressure is always slightly off in these quarters, but every time she’s complained to Wheaton she’s gotten nothing back but a shrug and roll of the eyes. _C’mon, Penny, I've got bigger enemies to slay_ , he’d tell her. Inflated overheads, for one. The politics of management flecking his dark hair with wisps of grey. _So suck it like the rest of us._

And under the machine hissing with steam, she’d flip him the bird. 

“Stirrers, stirrers, where art thou...” 

Her voice hits a wall of silence, and she smiles, liking the setting. No audience here but boxes taped up to be opened in a Martian summer market. Recordings of old auditions she still keeps in her database show a girl mouthing the same over-practiced lines, too young then to understand what acting meant and why she was doomed to fail at it, like a comet flaring past too quick to be seen. No, better to be good at something, though that something mightn’t be grand or important; better to wake the people up of a morning and send them on their way with lips burning; better to make them happy. And she _is_ good. She’s a god damn master of her skill. If she could just make peace with the whole zero appreciation thing, life would be absolutely rosy.

An urgent buzzing interrupts her monologue from getting too radical. She gropes at her pocket and hooks the slider to her ear. “Hey...”

“Penny, where the fuck are you?”

“Looking for your stash. Thought I’d do a roll and sell it.” Penny spots the package on a high shelf and reaches awkwardly, her muscles stretching to accommodate. She grins at Wheaton’s voice and wedges the bulky pack on one shoulder. “You never know what people will swap bad credit for in this place.”

There’s a sigh in her ear. His tone isn’t mean, he’s just blunt. They both are. Sentimentality doesn’t wash out here; she’s learned that a long time ago. “I need stirrers, Penny, and while it’s not a life and death situation _yet_ , I should warn you that Raj is getting that cute, panicky expression, which as we all know means I’m about twenty seconds from turning on the riot hose. Besides,” adds Wil, “your favorite customer’s arrived. So hurry up, yeah?” 

She can hear background noise, chatting, high-pitched laughter. Penny blinks twice and a line of numbers flash across her left eye: 15.02. Time when the afternoon run is just starting to build, that friendly caffeine high from a busy morning having middled out and pressing to be fed again. 

Matching Wil’s sigh, she shakes her head and says, “Right on schedule.”

“Hey, he’s wearing black today. Brings out those baby blues.”

“You’re a little shit. I was going to mooch around a bit, but now I really am coming back. People get scared when you flirt, you know. They get mean with their tips.” She taps the slider, cutting off the laugh at the other end, and walks back into the corridor. 

The service elevator takes its sweet time getting down. Penny looks to the floor again and her fingers trace the outline of her precious cargo, still resting on her shoulder. It would be nice to find a corner and sleep. _I'll sleep when it’s light outside_ , she thinks. _So, never_. The distant rumble approaches, down, down the floors, mocking her daydream. She gives in to the moment and lets her eyelids close. 

 

::

 

In all the time she’s worked in that shop she’s never once had a real conversation with him. She knows him by names: his first (Sheldon) and his last (Cooper). She knows him by occupation: he’s a physicist, working half his days on Mars and half on Earth, travelling between the two so often that those halves should really be thirds, with the last a working life that’s all motion, like hers. He comes in every day and orders the same white-leaf tea (tall). Regular as an orbit, familiar as space dust, he sits in the same corner table below Stuart’s painting of Pluto-the-Forgotten and drinks slowly, staring outside. Sometimes he reads, sometimes he works with a tablet. Often he just fixes his gaze at an indeterminate point and stays sitting, still as a pause. 

He intrigues her. When he’s not there, she wonders about him, and when he is there, she tries her best to ignore him. The first she can’t shake. The second she fails at miserably. Wheaton makes an irritating point of trying to bait her by covering the blackboard behind the counter with poetry, sonnets written when Earth was on its own in the universe and love wasn’t the near disease it is now. This is a big ship; they move in circles that intersect only where the smell of freshly ground coffee beans permeate the air. 

They are direct, mirror-like opposites. Penny laughs, openly and often. Sheldon Cooper, well, she wonders if he even knows how. 

And there she goes again, wondering. Getting to be a bad habit. Like biting her nails, gnawing with distraction at the skin until it pops with blood. She’ll spend out her days like some robot version of herself if she’s not careful. All that wondering, it’s got to be bad for her complexion. No fucking surprise she hasn't been on a date in over a year...

“Here I am, you can untangle your panties, boys!” She launches into the kitchen, bumping Raj playfully with her shoulder. Though the swinging doors she can see Wheaton busy at the machine, multitasking with enviable grace. 

Raj wrinkles his nose. “You smell lovely.”

“Yeah, like a frickin’ bouquet.” Penny nods past him. “He still out there?”

“Is space an empty void of loneliness?” 

Pulled up by his wistful tone, she slides her fingers against Raj’s cheek. “I got this,” she says, kindly now, and presses the bag of stirrers into his arms.

 

::

 

Penny has excellent foresight. She can lose whole outfits in the tiny black hole that is her wardrobe, sure, and often forgets her own birthday, but when it comes to the whims of society, she’s usually never wrong.

This is how it progresses.

They’ll ask her: what are you doing? What are you doing with that weirdo? He throws insults at random strangers and stands toe to toe with people of authority until they buckle down and give in to his inhuman demands. As if they haven’t enough shit to do to keep this damn boat pointing in the right direction for a start, there’s this guy, cloaked like a moth in his emotionless cocoon and telling them what’s up and down and every way sideways! Don’t go there, Penny, just don’t.

Sheldon has Blue-level clearance. A step above White in the randomly chosen color scheme, it basically means he’s valuable as all fuck. Valuable to his employers, valuable to the larger population, an asset whose only true contemporaries are decades older. It takes time spent in his company to understand this, and also to understand what it is he goes without, and willingly.

Don’t go there, they’ll say. 

It’s like she’s moving into pockmarked, explosive territory, this strange alignment she’s making with him that hasn’t even really happened yet. Hasn’t even progressed beyond looks and too much thinking. She’s been to the bad places, relationship-wise. She knows what it’s like to have her heart broken into shards – 

But she’ll go where she wants. Because she wonders. Still wonders about him, about his caffeine-free routine. It’s a god damned circle of wondering. A wondering that makes her a different sort of crazy, maybe, one compatible with his. 

 

::

 

She walks right up to him and sits down.

“Hi.”

Surprise holds his gaze to hers, but only for a few seconds. Then he’s looking back to his tablet, shoulders hunched, wrists curved inward as if protecting something. Penny looks over and sees a dense map of numbers, crossed through with multiple lines where he’s been scribbling with his pen. She waits.

“Do you need the table?” 

His voice is so low she’s not sure the words are even his. But then he’s looking up, straight at her, and it’s the first time she’s seen him properly from front on. The neat chin, the slightly fussy haircut. Lines stand out on his forehead, the pale skin pulled taut there by one eyebrow that he raises and keeps raised as the silence carries on. Penny shifts, conscious of the sudden and alarming fire of her impulse. She’s run ahead of herself again. Wheaton’s got to be watching this, she thinks, and probably chuckling into his beard like a king. Perfect. _Shit._

“Do you need me to move?” he asks. “I can move. I’ve finished my drink.”

Sheldon begins to gather his things. She glances at the empty cup and says, “No! Don’t. I, I um –” She’s fumbling. There’s a ring of brown staining her thumb; she rubs at it and can feel his eyes on her. “I just, well. You come here every day. I make you tea...” And then the words come freely, with an urgency she can’t control. “You know, there’s – there’s this whole art to making the perfect coffee, this whole, beautiful art, and all I do for you is pour water into a cup! Don’t you think that’s weird? I keep thinking, hey, this guy’s missing out on something. I want to show it to him. I want to show him what he’s missing.” She laughs, warmth flaring across her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

Down goes the eyebrow. He draws his lips into a tight smile. No, not quite a smile. But close. “What for?”

“Talking nonsense at you.”

“I don’t mind.”

It’s only relief that makes her grin. That’s a very good thing, though, because she has no confidence in doing subtle any more. “Funny. I thought you would.”

“Then we’ve both had our assumptions set to rights,” he says breezily. There’s self-assurance in his tone now, as if he’s shrugged off a guarding layer, laid a little rawness to bare. Not arrogance – she’d have walked away if she’d gotten any hint of a bastard in him – but it’s enough to draw out her curiosity. 

“Well. I don’t consider my day complete until _that_ happens, you know.”

It’s only by sheer luck she doesn’t actually wink here. Maybe this is all just something she needs to get out of her system. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Raj hovering a few tables over, water jug in hand. Probably sent out as a scouting party to report any useful tidbits back to Wheaton. Pretending to take great interest in the end of her ponytail, she sends a rude gesture in his direction, then turns her attention back to Sheldon. 

Who responds by raising his chin and frowning.

 _It’s a challenge_ , Penny thinks, and it’s a thought colored with desperation, almost as if she has been startled awake. _Take it. Just do something for once._

There’s a pounding in her chest and a flush in her cheeks. She doesn’t understand it; it makes no sense. So she tries the only thing that does. She puts both hands flat on the table and asks him out on a date.

 

::

 

This is how it progresses. 

A friendship begins over coffee that neither drink. Sheldon because he doesn’t. Penny because when he speaks, she loses track of everything else. 

But that’s okay. There are other adventures to be had.

“Um... you want to tell me where exactly we’re going?”

She trails his tall body as he winds with speed through corridors she has never stepped foot in. It feels like they’re walking through the veins of the ship.

“Sheldon –” She tries again, almost losing him as he takes a hard right, plunging into flickering low light. He’s not listening. “Wait up, I... damn it.”

True, it was Penny who did the asking, who did careful aligning of their respective schedules (his, busy and minutely planned out for pretty much the next decade; hers, non-existent), but for all of her boldness in taking the lead, so far it’s been Sheldon at the wheel of this ride. ‘Ride’ because ‘date’ seems too generous a label right now. 

Which is not to say she can’t still be royally pissed when the situation screams out for it.

“ _Sheldon!_ ”

There’s a little more fire in her lungs this time, and she slams the punctuation by grabbing his sleeve, and here he turns. Penny gathers her breath and fixes him with a glare. “Look. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I – oh, shit.”

They emerge out of the dark. Above them stretches the round dome of the ship, propped up in that artificial sky like a beetle’s shell. A vast, transparent skin, curving over and around them without end.

Penny stares. She stares until her neck pinches. _Every time_ , she thinks. _God, this ship. Why does it still get me? How do I still let it?_

Sheldon is the first to speak. “What do you see?” he asks her, and she’s not sure if it’s even a question because he’s not looking at her any more, and his voice is filled with a deep tremor that seems to come from everywhere at once. But when he gently unsticks her fingers from the edge of his sleeve she can sense something waiting in him. Just waiting, entirely patient. 

“Space,” she says. She counters his ambiguity with a shrug and is rewarded with a sideways glance from Sheldon. “I see a great black space filled with the sounds of my growling stomach because I was kind of hoping for dinner. You know. At some point.”

His eyes dance briefly. He’s full of surprises. “Okay.”

 

::

 

This is how it progresses. 

She laughs when she shouldn’t, and he doesn’t care. He makes statements of vast impenetrability, and she doesn’t care. The caring comes in other ways and from other things. They have the strangest dates in the oddest places. 

One exact month from the end of this Earth to Mars voyage, one month from their first exchanged words, and that’s when she kisses him, almost without thought. Truthfully, she would’ve held out for longer, and perhaps they might have never gotten there. It surprises her how much that doesn’t matter, how few genuine moments of _fuck this_ she allows herself when considering the absence of intimacy that hovers around their relationship. It’s background noise, whether it’s there or not, whether it’s inevitable or distant; she simply doesn’t care. 

He doesn’t pull away. He presses his lips to hers instead. And when his fingers brush over her shoulders and trace an outline of that inorganic thing holding her name (Maxwell, Penny) and occupation (barista) as if it were the most precious part of her, and when she does the same thing back; it’s almost a non-issue. After a while they stop and pick up their conversation, and after a while it happens again. It’s as if progression has gone and twisted itself in all the directions it shouldn’t, and her heart is warming fast to every turn.

 

::

 

“Here,” says Wil, his voice loud and enthusiastic. “Smell and tell me that’s not the most perfect scent in the cosmos.”

Penny pushes her nose towards the beans obediently. Eyes closed, she wills herself to another place. A coffee shop back on Earth, a time before the people were urged to take work off-planet because what was once home could no longer handle the bursting population. She draws in her boss’s enthusiasm instead, and smiles, disguising the faint stab of pain brought on by that memory. 

“It sure is,” she says. 

Her eyes scan the printing on the cloth. It’s a shipment from one of the Martian communities. She recognizes it as the one where Sheldon works, and waves him over.

“Waving terms already, I see,” murmurs Wil, at her back. She catches him with her elbow. His grunt and grimace turns into a knowing smile as they observe Sheldon’s approach, his path around the tables taken in a calm unhurried line as if planned and practiced daily. When he arrives he tips his head to one side curiously. 

“Yes, Penny?”

Something plunges in her stomach. If she’s doing this, she has to make it work. “Okay, so. I want you to watch. Then tell me.”

He frowns. “Watch? And tell you what?”

But she’s already busy, moving quickly and grabbing the things she needs. The machine is a barrier between them; steam clouds the air and in her periphery Sheldon’s rigid posture wavers slightly. She hears his voice, mixed with Wil’s now. They’re debating over her head in a rapid-fire parry and exchange; the merits of coffee as if coffee were a fundamental element stopping the universe from falling apart. And maybe it is, she thinks. Maybe that's the whole point. 

She finishes and breathes in deep, a breath that’s all hers, steeped with air-light froth and rich with sensation. It hits her hard. It makes her mind sing.

“There,” she says, placing the cup before him. “Look.”

Sheldon cuts off his argument with Wil and bends down. He does as he’s bid, eyes fixed carefully, exacting, just as she’s seen him do with a page of numbers or field of stars. 

“What do you see?” she asks.

Yes, the words come out harshly, just a bit, and yes, there’s a part of her that wants to take them back and offer them again. She’s been here too long, caught in the endless rut of travel, nothing left of her except a damp silver trail as if she were a snail and her shell has been stripped from her skin. He has to understand.

She needs him to understand. 

“Penny...” he says. 

He gets no further. She wonders if this is the real progression of things. The shop murmuring around them. Customers bumping the register as Wil drifts over to attend. Watching each other while this dumb ship of theirs hums through an earth brown cloud, stirred sweet and burning the tongue. For too long she wonders; and it starts to hurt, and in creep the doubts again; but then she sees it. _You_. There, in his eyes. 

She sees it.


End file.
